ISSN 1393-614X Minerva - An Internet Journal of
Philosophy Vol. 10 2006
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Kant on Relations and the Selbstsetzungslehre
[Self-Positing] Lubica Učník |
Abstract
In our day, it is the fact that power is exercised through both right
and disciplines, that the techniques of discipline and discourses born of
discipline are invading right, and that normalizing procedures are increasingly
colonizing the procedures of the law, that might explain the overall workings
of what I would call a ‘normalizing society’ (Foucault 2003, pp. 38-9).
In this paper, I outline Kant’s attempt to
account for relations, which is concomitant with his effort to prove that
atomism cannot describe human experience.[1] The idea of ‘relation’ at issue is something much more general than the
formal ‘category of relation’ of the First
Critique (Kant 1996, A 80/B 106). The inquiry is directed to the spirit
informing Kant’s entire oeuvre rather
than the letter of one of his texts. In order to make sense of Kant’s
renunciation of atomism, I sketch some influential theories that he reacted
against. It might be objected that to revisit Kant’s work is an antiquated
undertaking. Yet I want to suggest that, despite Kant’s effort, in our age, the
problematic nature of relations is entrenched in the privileging of atomistic
individualism in opposition to community.[2] On the one hand, the
emphasis on the consumerism of the individual based on her singular choices is
presented as the only way to live in the world; yet on the other, global
interconnection (most visibly expressed by Internet communication) is expanding
daily. So, to understand this impasse, I propose to return to Kant’s oeuvre and his struggle against
atomistic versions of the world. In the last instance, it is a transit from I think to I act; and it is also recognition that to act can only be performed
in a relational manner in community
with others. It is a journey from 1747, when in his earliest pre-critical work
“Thoughts on the Estimation of Living Forces” (Gedanken von der wahren Schätzung der lebendigen Kräfte), Kant
refused the atomistic version of the universe to his last, unpublished work the
Opus Postumum, where his rejection of
atomism led him to assert the self-positing subject who has rights and is
living in community with others in the world.[3] So, in the light of what I just discussed, how can we explain relations?
Our experience in today’s globalised world is
described as individualistic. Allegedly, social bonds are dissolving and the
basic unit of society is comprised of lonely, consuming individuals for whom
the highest ideal of freedom is the choice between different consumer goods. By
contrast, Jean-Luc Nancy claims that it is immaterial how far back we examine the history
of thought; we will always come across a sense of grieving for that elusive
community, that, interminably, seems to be disappearing. Yet the next
generation begins anew the same nostalgic grieving. It is as though community
is something intangible. Thus, instead of identifying the individual and
community as oppositional, we should realise that they depend on each other.[4] I want to continue
this line of thought but from a different perspective.
Background
I have argued elsewhere that the modern
understanding of society can be seen in two ways.[5] Here I note very briefly my contention. In 1625, for Hugo Grotius “man
neither was, nor is, by nature, a wild unsociable creature” (Grotius 1901, p.
24). For Grotius, we all can rationally recognise the idea of justice and
morality because we are social
beings. Grotius argues that man lives with others and it follows that he can
clearly see that the idea of justice “[appears] the same to all men” (Ibid.). Natural law is guaranteed by
nature alone since it is an ‘innate’ law that is ‘implanted in the mind’ of us
all (Grotius 1916, p. 5). Grotius always proceeds from the concept of humankind
or people as his starting point, because he bases his understanding of society
on the notion of sociability (Ibid.,
p. 6).[6] This social model underpins continental philosophy. By contrast for
Hobbes in 1651, “the life of man [is] solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and
short,” because his life is a constant struggle for survival (Hobbes 1968, Book
I, xiii, p. 186). As Jacques Taminiaux tells us, for Hobbes “man is apolitical,
asocial, and amoral by nature” (Taminiaux 1985, p. 5). Man is unfit to live
with others without the controlling arm of a coercive government. Hobbes,
impressed by success of natural sciences, turns to Galileo and his idea of
motion. Thus for Hobbes, the world consists of nothing but matter and motion. A
body is free if its path is not
obstructed by another body. The concept of negative liberty, if not in name,
has its intellectual beginning in the Hobbesian vision of society.[7] Modern Anglo-Saxon
philosophy starts with Hobbes and his understanding of the individual as a
self-subsisting atom. In this version of society, relations are hard to account
for.
To understand a difference between Grotius’s
social man and Hobbes’s self-interested man, I will focus on the Kantian
understanding of relations of which community represents one of the subsets to
argue that these two versions of individualism are not only indicative of
political theories, but also reflect differences in theories of knowledge.
Using only wide brushstrokes, I want to claim that the conception of community
and relations underlies the theories of continental philosophy. By contrast,
Anglo-Saxon philosophy is based on atomism where the individual exists as a
self-subsisting entity. Given this, no doubt controversial, claim, I propose
that, to speak of community, we must necessarily start from a relational nature
of being-in-the-world, because to speak of a society that is composed of
individuals as free floating atoms forecloses any possibility of relational
political space, and for Kant, space in general. As he says, “to frame the
world according to the principle of atomism or corpuscular philosophy is to
make space into something which is yet nothing. Atomi ac inane” (Kant 1995, 22:89). I also suggest that if our
understanding of the world is based in the Leibnizian system on ‘monads’ or the
Lockean system on ‘ideas,’ there is no possibility of a synthesis of
substances, that is, of community. Unless we admit the possibility of relations
between substances, singular monads or ideas cannot account for a higher order
of unification by themselves. The possibility of community becomes an enigma.
The Leibnizian pre-established harmony between separated monads can only be
guaranteed by introducing God into his system. Kant was the first to recognise
this problem[8] and in his work, basing its possibility on relations, he posits
community as a formal, logical category and as a social phenomenon.
The Kantian attempt must be understood in its
historical context. To account for the possibility of a world where not atomism
but relations are indicative of our human community is a twofold struggle
against dogmatic rationalism and empiricism. Thus, to follow Kant’s project, we
should remember that, as he says, he was woken up from his slumber by Hume and
Leibniz. His project is to overcome the pretentious claims of reason. As he
says, “human reason has a peculiar fate in one kind of its cognitions: it is
troubled by questions that it cannot dismiss, because they are posed to it by
the nature of reason itself, but that it also cannot answer, because they
surpass human reason’s every ability” (Kant 1996, A vii). Kant explains that a
reliance on innate ideas as a basis of knowledge, without recourse to
experience, or taking experience as the only source of knowledge, will force
reason to exceed its limit and end in antinomies. Leibniz and Locke make such
errors.
For Leibniz, as for rationalists, all our ideas
are innate, unchangeable, implanted in our minds by God. His example is a
“block of marble”. The figure of Hercules is already in the marble and the
sculptor sees the “veins in the stone.” He proceeds skilfully to “clear them by
polishing, and by cutting away” the excess, thus liberating Hercules to the
eyes of the future spectators. Similarly, our ideas are already in our mind. We
are not always aware of them because of distractions or wants, but the ideas of
“being, unity, substance, duration, change, activity, perception, pleasure” and
others cannot come from experience; they are innate (Leibniz 1934, 141-91, pp.
146-7). By contrast, Locke and the other empiricists deny the validity of
innate ideas. For the empiricists, there is no Hercules hidden in the granite.
All our ideas come from experience. As Chaim Perelman writes, “Locke reverted
to the old Aristotelian and Scholastic principle Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu – there is
nothing in the mind which has not previously been in the senses” (Perelman
1965, p. 159). When we are born, our mind is like a white sheet of paper, or,
as Locke puts it, a tabula rasa.
Impressions from experience are imprinted upon it as ideas. Now, how can we
acquire knowledge from those simple ideas? In reflection, the mind superimposes
a variety of relations to link them together. Perelman notes that, unlike the
rationalists, for whom the only relation existed between “a substance and its
attributes,” and not “the relation between correlated phenomena;” Locke was the
earliest philosopher to recognise “the fundamental importance in knowledge of
the idea of relation” (Ibid., p.
162).
Since I claim that relations are important not
only for human understanding but also for community interaction or, rather,
that community is impossible without the existence of a relational spirit among
its members, we need to understand how Locke explains this notion. Even a
cursory look reveals that for Locke, relations indeed play an important role,
especially given that this is one way in which the mind juxtaposes simple ideas
to create new complex ideas and so on. As he says, “any idea, whether simple or complex, may be the occasion why the mind
thus brings two things together and, as it were, takes a view of them at once.”
So, from two ideas, such as mother and daughter, we can arrive at the idea of
parenthood; or from the ideas of doctor and patient we understand sickness. One
can see that those two ideas are comprehensible only in a relational manner.
Does this, then, undermine my claim that Anglo-Saxon theory is based on
atomism? A further claim by Locke makes my point clearer. He stresses that
ideas are always singular, existing separately from each other. Relations are
only superficial, and relative. Strictly speaking, there is no relation between
the idea of doctor and the idea of patient. The mind — to be able to get a view
of them simultaneously — introduces relations as a higher order. In themselves,
ideas are discrete imprints in the mind and “any of our ideas may be the foundation of relation” (Locke 1976, Book II,
Chapter XXV, 1, italics in original). So, the two ideas of hot and cold produce
the idea of temperature; the ideas of square and round result in the idea of
shape. Using the example of Caius, Locke clarifies that the ideas father and
son make the idea of Caius, in this case, the idea of parent. But the relation
is inherent neither to the idea of father nor son, because if Caius’s son dies,
nothing will change in terms of our idea of Caius. Since the son ceases to
exist, the link between the ideas of father and son is broken; therefore, Caius
is no longer associated, or linked to the idea of son. We understand that he is
not a parent anymore. As Locke writes “the nature
therefore of relation consists in the
referring or comparing two things one to another, from which comparison one or
both comes to be denominated.” In short, “two things” do not influence or alter
each other, and, according to Locke, “if either of those things be removed or
cease to be, the relation ceases, and the denomination consequent to it, though
the other receive in itself no alteration at all” (Ibid., italics in original). Ideas are singular and relations are,
by Locke’s own admission, relative. Since in Locke, ideas are combined through
reflection, Leibniz pointed out that, despite Locke’s insistence, those
relations cannot be drawn from experience.
David Hume agrees that those relations are not
in the world but only in our mind, and he extends this view one step further.
He says that those relations are, in fact, nothing else but the illusion of our
mind, based on our habits, superstitions, and tradition. The reason that we think that there is a relation between
events in the world is “by means of custom, which determines the imagination to
make a transition from the idea of one object to that of its usual attendant,
and from the impression of one to a more lively idea of the other” (Hume 1978,
Book I, Part III, Sect. XIV). Hume’s solution was, of course, to deny that
causation has any objective status by declaring that if we see certain events
following one after the other, we assume
that there is a relation, and hence causality.[9] Hume rejects causality as something existing outside us. According to
him, it is only our habitual way of thinking that makes us imagine that there
are relations between different events.
The Humean solution has grave implications for
the possibility of natural science. This problem became the impetus for Kant to
reject both dogmatic metaphysics, represented by the name of Leibniz, which
builds its system outside of the experiential world, and empiricism, which proclaims
that all our knowledge comes from experience, and which yet, in the end, denies
this worldly experience and explains it away as the work of our imagination. To
put it differently, rationalists discard experience as unreliable, while
building a tall tower of pure speculative reason, only leading to antinomies
within reason’s domain,[10] while empiricists try to derive “pure concepts of understanding” from
experience alone. Yet, on the road from experience to ideas the latter abandon
experience as well, leading, according to Kant, to fanaticism and scepticism.[11]
So, how can we account for those relations
that, according to Hume, are figments of our imagination? The problem is
important not only for our human understanding and the actuality of human
community, but is also imperative for the possibility of physics, in other
words, for the existence of the world.
The Copernican Shift
To avoid the Scylla of dogmatic rationalism and
not be shipwrecked by the Charybdis of empiricism, Kant proposes altering the focus
of metaphysics. Following the success of mathematics and natural science, he
offers to perform an experiment modelling it on Copernicus’s method that
overturned the way celestial bodies were investigated. Copernicus’s change of
focus involved a shift from the geocentric universe where the world with a
spectator was the centre, to the heliocentric universe where the world was just
one of the planets rotating around the sun, with a spectator on one of those
planets.[12] Likewise, Kant reverses the focus of metaphysics to assert our contribution to knowledge. For him,
humans are “spectators and, at the same time, originators” (Kant 1995, 22:421).
Instead of our cognition corresponding to objects in the world, as it was
assumed until then,[13] Kant acknowledges an “organon of pure reason,” that is, our
participation in shaping knowledge.[14] As he says, “if our intuition had to conform to the character of its
objects, then I do not see how we could know anything a priori about that
character. But I can quite readily conceive of this possibility if the object
(as object of the senses) conforms to the character of our power of intuition”
(Kant 1996, B xvii). In other words, “transcendental philosophy is the
consciousness of the capacity of being the originator of the system of one’s
ideas, in theoretical as well as in practical respect” (Kant 1995, 21:93). An
organon, or as Kant says in the Opus
Postumum, an “instrument for transcendental philosophy” is “synthetic a priori knowledge” (Kant 1995, 21:92).
The emphasis is on our human contribution to the formation of knowledge. For
Kant, “transcendental philosophy is the doctrine of the complex of ideas, which
contain the whole of synthetic a priori
knowledge from concepts in a system both of theoretical-speculative and moral-practical
reason, under a principle through which the thinking subject constitutes itself
… as person, and is itself the originator of this system of ideas” (Kant 1995,
21:91). Kant begins to investigate the possibility of human finite knowledge,
i.e., epistemology and metaphysics in the First
Critique. At the end of his life, in Opus
Postumum, he ventures to account for the transfer from the metaphysical
considerations of natural science to physics. In the process, Kant returns to
his beginning by trying to explain forces in the world, in other words
relations. In order to substantiate his explanation of real forces in the world, he rethinks and extends his understanding
of the subject. Thus, the subject as the unity of apperception is extended and
transformed to the self-positing subject living in the world with others.
According to Kant, if we start from the
atomistic universe, the idea of relations, formal or real, and, by extension,
the category of community, becomes a chimera. For Kant, in the first instance,
“our judgment must surely be this: since through outer sense,” that is space,
“we are given nothing but mere relational presentations, outer sense can, by
the same token, contain in its presentation only the relation of an object to
the subject, but not the intrinsic character belonging to the object in itself.
The same applies to inner intuition,” that is time (Kant 1996, B 67). The
claim, as Locke has it, that knowledge is built by associating different ideas,
means that our relation to the world is problematic. Ideas are not objects. For
Kant, perceptions “without an object … would be nothing but a blind play of
presentations – i.e., they would be less than a dream” (Kant 1996, A 112).
Associations between ideas cannot explain the coherence of our perceptions. In
opposition to the empirical view (where ideas from experience are imprinted
singularly on our mind, forming the basis from which we form our knowledge of
the world by associating and comparing them in a certain way), for Kant, our
understanding of the world is embedded in the relational nature of our
intuition towards the thing in itself, the noumenon and vice versa: “Through receptivity an object is given to us; through spontaneity an object is thought in relation to that [given] presentation
(which [otherwise]) is a mere determination of the mind)” (Kant 1996, A 50/B
74, square brackets in Pluhar’s translation, italics added).
Our experience is guaranteed by the relational
nature of our human understanding, not the other way around, that is, our
understanding is formed by experience. Kant says that “the complex of
experience can only be founded for
experience (for its sake) in knowledge – not from experience” (Kant 1995, 22:98-99, italics in original). Our
knowledge of the world is dependent not only on sensibility but also on our
human concepts, on our human constitution: “Human cognition has two stems,
viz., sensibility and understanding, which perhaps spring from
a common root, though unknown to us. Through sensibility objects are given to us; through understanding they
are thought” (Kant 1996, A 15/B 29,
italics in original). Thus the ‘stuff’ coming from the world is ‘put through a
mesh’ of categories ‘shaping’ it to structure our experience. As Kant
summarises it, stressing our human contribution to the possibility of
experience, “we do not derive the data of intuition from sensible
representations (neither from impressions nor concepts); rather, it is we who
first provide data out of which cognitions can be woven (into the cognitions
possible from them): e.g. attraction, for the sake of determinations and laws
of its relation in space and time. He who
would know the world must first manufacture it – in his own self, indeed”
(Kant 1995, 21:41, italics in original).
We can only experience the phenomenal world as
it is structured by our understanding, since “sense-objects in experience … contain the representation of objects as
appearances (phaenomena) which does
not present (exhibit) what objects
are in themselves but how they affect sense” (Kant 1995, 22:318). To put it differently,
we can only know appearances, never things in themselves. Yet noumena must have the
property of relation, otherwise there would be no possibility for us to intuit
them.[15] There must be a relation between us and the world. Otherwise, as Kant
maintains, “an absurd proposition would follow, viz., that there is appearance
without anything that appears” (Kant 1996, B xxv-xvi). If noumena were
self-subsisting, there would be no possibility for us to intuit, and
consequently, cognize them as phenomena. We cannot comprehend and subsequently
experience “things each of which completely isolates itself through its
subsistence” (Kant 1996, B 292-3). Self-subsisting, singular entities cannot
influence each other by definition. So, if there are no relations between
substances, there is no possibility of knowledge.
Furthermore, how could we make sense of
different intuitions if our understanding was passive, based only on those
percepts? As Kant remarks, “for who can enumerate all perceptions which can
present themselves to his senses?” (Kant 1995, 22:95) Without acknowledging
humans’ active contribution, “our soul” would be “filled with a crowd of
appearances that yet could never turn into experience” (Kant 1996, A 111). Yet
we can intuit something and understand the stream of percepts as something that
is an object in the world. What is the mechanism that merges those different
multiple intuitions into an experience of one single object? Surely, we do not
see a tree at once. How is it that we know that all those fleeting impressions
are impressions of one thing? Without the power to combine different intuitions
according to the concepts of identity and relation – thus producing our
experience of an appearance, say of a tree, as knowledge of one indivisible
object out there in the phenomenal world – not only would the world disappear,
but also our claim to knowledge. Kant writes that for us to have experience,
“appearances must in mere intuition be subject to the formal conditions of
space and time, so must appearances in experience be subject to conditions of
the necessary unity of apperception.” Essentially, as he claims, “this law says
that through these conditions alone does any cognition first becomes possible”
(Kant 1996, A 110). For Kant, “without sensibility no object would be given to
us; and without understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without
content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind” (Kant 1996, A 51/B
75). Our experience of the phenomenal world is based on the property of the
relation between noumena and sensibility, as well as the relational nature of
intuitions and concepts. Hence, “the conditions of the thoroughgoing unity of
self-consciousness” would be incomprehensible unless “everything must
necessarily be subject to the universal functions of synthesis” (Kant 1996, A
110-2). As a result, the “synthesis through original apperception” would be
impossible without relations (Kant 1996, A 94-5).
For Kant, relations are either logical, namely,
“a priori, formal external relations” or, in a domain of appearances in space
and time, they are “real relations” such as “action and reaction”. Accordingly,
space is the form of our outer intuition, while time is the form of inner
intuition that underlies all our understanding. Now, the question is: how can
logical relations constitute “conditions for the possibility of real relations”
and how can real relations, in turn, form “conditions for the possibility of
community?” (Kant 1996, B 292-3) It is a question of how we can move from
universal and necessary claims about the world, expressed in analytic
judgments, i.e., all bachelors are unmarried, where the truth of a proposition
is affirmed without our need to verify it by experience – it is logical – to
synthetic judgments, where our knowledge is dependent on experience. How can we
move from the formal relations
enumerated by Kant in his First Critique
to real relations in the world? How
is it that we live with others in community? Kant’s claim is that our
understanding and living in the world is relational.
There may well be other intelligent beings in
the universe whose experience could be different. Yet Kant is concerned with
our human condition. Instead of asking how experience corresponds to the world,
thus ending in a perpetual regress of confirmation, he changes his focus and
asks how human understanding participates
in the understanding of the world. Hence, from passive perceptions of things in
themselves which leave their marks on the mind as ideas, Kant turns around and
acknowledges the active agency not only of human understanding, but also of
moral-practical deliberation because, as he says, “in man there dwells an
active principle” (Kant 1995, 22:55) that determines his knowledge of the world
by three rules: “God, the world, and the concept of the subject which unites
them and brings synthetic unity into these concepts” (Kant 1995, 21:23). For
Kant, in his last unpublished work, the Opus
Postumum, the first two — God and the world — are posited by the third,
“the consciousness of my existence in the world in space and time” (Kant 1995,
21:24).
The Selbstsetzungslehre
We are familiar with the hyphenated description
of human condition – being-in-the-world – from Martin Heidegger’s way of
thinking. Yet a description of human existence in the world is already present
in Kant’s Opus Postumum. For Kant,
“the subject [is] rational world-being” or “the thinking world-being, man in
the world” (Kant 1995, 21:27. See also 21:32). In his last unfinished work,
Kant shifts his attention from theoretical, practical and reflective reasoning
to explain human experience in the world.
Eckart Förster writes that, initially, Kant’s last work was driven by his realization
that he left unexplained the possibility of physics.[16] Accordingly, to account for physics, in other words the world, Kant
revisited his previous claims to clarify the passage to physics from the
metaphysical consideration of the world that was defined by humility. Rae
Langton uses the notion of “humility” to refer to the idea that our finite
understanding of the world is limited to phenomena only (Langton 1998, pp.
41-43). However, if,
according to the critical Kantian system, we can only know phenomena, the
enquiry of physics would be second-hand, research into the “appearance of an
appearance,” so to speak.[17] The existence of forces as such becomes a
problem, since to examine them is to take them as really existing in the
physical field of investigation. If there is no possibility of knowing things
as they really are in themselves, how can we study forces? Yet if we accept
that forces are not real, there is no way to justify physics or the independent
existence of the world. What has to be done?
Kant’s preoccupation
with forces dates to the beginning of his career. In 1747, he submits in a
paper entitled “Thoughts on the Estimation of
Living Forces,” that if
“body, in virtue of its own force, may have the
tendency to move into all directions,” and “if force is a perpetual effort to have an
effect” on other bodies, then to say, as Leibniz does, that “active substances
actually have an effect [only] on themselves” is contradictory.[18] In short, if there are no relations between
bodies, which can influence each other physically, how can we understand
causality – that is change – in the world, and how is it possible for us to
intuit things in themselves? In other words, the possibility to account for the
world existing outside us is foreclosed.
In order to
eliminate this aporia and to account for the possibility of the world, Kant
begins his analysis again. Initially, he explains that, for physics, “the
appearance of appearance, thought in the connection of the manifold, is the
concept of the object itself” (Kant 1995, 22:325). Each perception is an appearance
which is synthesised further into an object through the universal functions of synthesis according to concepts, such as identity, relations and community. In
other words, we have an appearance of an appearance. Yet in the course of
clearing up this dilemma, and accounting for real forces as real relations in
the world, Kant changes his focus again. Förster notes that Kant realised that
the transition from metaphysics to physics is possible if “we focus our
attention on the moving subject, rather than on the object that moves.” The
reason is that “the subject is conscious of agitating its own moving forces,”
thereby predicting “the counteracting moving forces of matter” (Förster 1995, p. xli). We
should not forget that for Kant, matter is composed of forces, thus, the
“aggregate of the moving forces of matter is itself only appearance” (Kant 1995, 22:317). Physics,
then, is “knowledge of sense-objects in experience,” and it “contains the
representation of objects as appearances (phaenomena)
which does not present (exhibit) what
objects are in themselves but how they affect sense” (Kant 1995, 22:318).
Förster points out that “the moving forces of matter cannot be given to the
subject by being passively received” (Förster 1989, p. 230). As
already noted, there is reciprocity, mutual relation between affecting and
being affected by forces, i.e., there must be something to affect our
sensibility. For the subject to combine impressions
through understanding is to synthesise them into unity (Kant 1995, 21:23). Thus Kant becomes aware not only that human
beings are not passive recipients of ideas; but also that they can give rise to
power from themselves. In the natural world they are the only ones who can act
without impulse from outside. As he says: “Nature causes (agit). Man does (facit). The rational subject acting with
consciousness of purposes operates (operatur)” (Kant 1995, 21:18, italics in
original).
Hence, the consideration of physics, that is to
say, the world, leads Kant to maintain that an “immaterial moving principle in
an organic body is its soul, and, if one wishes to think of the latter as a
world-soul, one can assume of it that it builds its own body and even that
body’s dwelling-place [Gehäuse] (the
world)” (Kant 1995, 22:97, square brackets in translation). Following on from
this insight, Kant
claims that man’s “consciousness determining itself
contains spontaneity” (Kant 1995, 22:57, italics in original). The modus operandi changes from I think to I act. As Kant
writes, the “thinking subject also creates for itself a
world, as object of possible experience in space and time. This object is one
world. Moving forces are inserted in the latter (e.g. attraction and repulsion)
without which there would be no perceptions; but only what is formal” (Kant
1995, 21:23) which would mean either God’s point of view or a return to
dogmatic rationalism. In order not to lapse into dogmatic rationalism, Kant
asserts that man is a “personality” who “has rights, a body for whose
possibility one must think of an organizing force, that is, a force which acts
through internal purposes” (Kant 1995, 22:57).
In the Opus
Postumum, Kant concentrates on the “capacity of the self-determining
subject to constitute itself,” or, “to
make oneself” by reaffirming his moral-practical reasoning (Kant 1995,
21:93, italics in original). Man as a relational being is a “founder and
originator of his own self, by the quality of personality: the ‘I am’” (Kant 1995, 21:14, italics in
original). According to Kant, to know that I
am, I must first posit myself according to I think, which is not yet knowledge, not even “rational inference.”
It is only a “logical act, without content” (Kant 1995, 22:95). In order to
understand myself as a person who exists, I must posit myself as a
“sense-object in space and time and, at the same time, an object of the
understanding to myself. [I] am a person; consequently, a moral being who has rights” (Kant 1995,
21:13-14, italics and square brackets in translation). Transcendental
philosophy is only a “principle of forms in a system of all relations. Of God,
world, and the rational being in the world who comprehends them” (Kant 1995,
21:94). In other words, morality, nature and the subject, who “determines
itself by technical-practical reason” and by “moral-practical reason” is the
originator and the “object of both” (Kant 1995, 22:53).[19] Kant comments that while technical-practical reason concerns “skill and
arts,” moral-practical reason includes “duties.” In contrast, as Kant argues,
God has only rights and no duties, thus no one can claim rights against God
(Kant 1995, 21:9). Quite the reverse is true of humans. Human beings are
“subject to the concept of duty” (Kant 1995, 21:94) since they are never singular.
They always live in the world together and confer upon each other rights and
duties because they are relational beings.[20] For Kant, then, the “final end
of all knowledge is to know oneself in the highest practical reason” (Kant
1995, 21:156, italics in original). A person knows herself as a giver and maker
of laws in line with the categorical imperative, that is, laws that apply to
all in a community of equals. In Kant’s unfinished last work, a free autonomous
person is a being with rights and duties living in the world in community with
others.
Kant, in the Opus Postumum, moves beyond the understanding of the subject as the
unity of apperception; he asserts her moral acting in the world in relation to
others as the primary consideration. It is this self acting, self-positing
subject living in the world with others that is important for the consideration
of community. As Heidegger reminds us, “Kant … realizes … that the real nature
of the ‘I’ is not the I think, but the ‘I act,’ I give myself the
law from the basis of my being, I am free” (Heidegger 1985, p. 92, italics in
original). More to the point, if ‘I act’ is indicative of our living in the
world, Arendt’s observation is important. For her, every action presupposes
many; therefore its outcome is always unpredictable. We live in the world with
others and everything we do influences somebody else, thus we need to learn how
others think and take into account their standpoint in order to be able to
achieve our common ends.[21]
Conclusion
In this paper, I have argued that there are two
different ways to understand the concept of the individual. One conception is
of an atomistic individual living in the world of her own choices without
relations to others; on the other, the relational individual lives in community
with others. Thus to return to
To conclude, “transcendental philosophy’s
highest standpoint [is] God, the world, and the thinking being in the world
(man)” (Kant 1995, 21:32). For Kant, without the thinking being, there would be no possibility to think of God let
alone to experience the world. Without the acting
being in the world, the possibility of freedom, relations to others and
community would be void. Without relations there would be no possibility of
community. Lastly, without community, the idea of rights that are by definition
tied to the idea of duties would lose its meaning in every sense of the word,
not only as a theoretical construct, but also as a practical guarantee of
certain freedoms for humans. It is at this point that we need to return and
affirm the Kantian doctrine of rights and duties to reclaim real relations in
the social context as universal and encompassing all human beings equally, not
only some who are privileged by instrumental contemporary claims of
opportunistic governments in the name of the latest positive legislation.
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[1] This is not Kant’s expressis verbis but my extrapolation.
[2] For Kant, community is a
subset of the category of relation (Kant 1996, A 80/B 106). He defines
community, for example, as “interaction (Wechselwirkung) between agent and patient” or as “the causality of a substance reciprocally
determining [and being determined by] another substance” (Kant 1996, B 111,
square brackets in Pluhar’s translation). The category of community is further
defined by the “predicables of presence and resistance” (Kant 1996, A 82, B
108).
[3] For an account of Kant’s
underlying theme of community from the early pre-critical writings to his
latest, see Shell 1996.
[4] See
[5] See Učník 2003. See also Učník 2003/2004. For an argument
suggesting differences between these two traditions, see also Bloom 1987;
Barker 1957;
[6] Translators render
Grotius’s expression “populosque” and
“gentium” as nation. See, for example,
Grotius 1916. Given the meaning of the word nation today, I use the term people
instead.
[7] Jeremy Bentham first
proposed the term negative liberty in an effort to articulate the concept of
the individual who is able to act freely in the absence of external
constraints. See Day 1983, p. 18; Long 1977, p. 54; Skinner 1998, pp. 82-3.
[8] “The monads … are in fact
efficacious merely within themselves. … because of this, Leibniz’ principle of
the possible community of substances
among one another also had to be a [preestablished]
harmony, and could not be a physical
influence. For since everything is engaged only inwardly, i.e., with its
presentations, one substance’s state of presentations could not stand in any
efficacious linkage whatsoever with that of another substance” (Kant 1996, A 274-5/B330-1, italics and square
brackets in Pluhar’s translation).
[9] According to him, “the necessary connexion betwixt causes and effects is the foundation of
our inference from one to the other. The foundation of our inference is the
transition arising from the accustom’d union” (Ibid., Book I, Part III, Sect. XIV).
[10] Late in his life, Kant explains to Garve, “Not the investigation of the
existence of God, of immortality, etc. but the antinomy of pure reason was the
point from which I began: ‘The world has a beginning: it has no beginning,
etc., …There is freedom in human being, against: there is no freedom and
everything is natural necessity;’ it was this that first woke me from my
dogmatic slumber and drove me to the critique of reason itself to dissolve the
scandal of the contradiction of reason with itself” (in Gillespie 1984, pp. 30-1).
[11] “Of these two illustrious
men, Locke left the door wide open for fanaticism;
for once reason has gained possession of such rights, it can no longer be kept
within limits by indefinite exhortations to moderation. Hume, believing that he
had uncovered so universal a delusion – regarded as reason – of our cognitive
power, surrendered entirely to scepticism”
(Kant 1996, B128, italics in original).
[12] See, for example, Koyré 1992.
[13] See Kant 1996, B xv-xvii.
[14] “An Organon of pure reason would be the sum of those principles by
which all pure a priori cognitions can be acquired and actually brought about”
(Kant 1996, A 11-2/B 24-5, italics in original).
[15] See Langton (1998) for an explanation.
[16] See Förster 1989, 1995,
2000. For a different reading of Kant’s Opus Postumum, see Tuschling 1989 and Vuillemin 1989.
[17] For a further explanation, see Förster 1995, pp. xli ff.
[18] Kant 1998, Section 12,
pp. 288-89, square brackets in Carpenter's translation.
[19] See also 22:55-56; 21:12; 21:94.
[20] “Man is not an animal with internal purposes or senses, etc. (e.g. organs, understanding)
but a person who has rights, and against whom all other
persons have rights” (Kant 1995, 22:56, italics in original).
[21] See Arendt 1998. See also Kant 1991, 1999.
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Lubica Učník teaches Philosophy at Murdoch
University, Perth,
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